John Gribbin - Impossible, Possible, and Improbable: Science Stranger Than Fiction

Half the Answer

I n The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. The essays contained in the pages of this book do indeed cover life, the Universe and (more or less) everything, but as there are only 21 of them, the best I can claim is that they provide half the answer to those ultimate questions. Even this modest achievement, however, is more than I had in mind when, back in the days before COVID-19, I combined my fascination with quantum physics and my enjoyment of short-form writing to produce Six Impossible Things.

I am not alone in my fascination with quantum physics, so that choice of subject matter needs no explanation. But why try to confront the mystery of the quantum world in short essays rather than the big book that the topic seems to demand? Part of the answer is that I had already tried the big book approach (more than once) and liked the idea of trying something completely different. But the main reason is that the short form offers a particular set of challenges that I enjoy, and a particular kind of satisfaction when it works. Explaining a scientific concept in 3,000 words is often much harder than explaining it in 30,000 words, but harder or not it is a different skill, just as the ability to paint tiny miniatures is a different skill from the ability to paint life-size portraits. I seem to have acquired this skill young I was sometimes mildly reprimanded during English lessons at school for making my prcis too short and honed it during my time as a journalist, notably with New Scientist.

Looking back at some of my early books, it is obvious that they were really a series of New Scientist-level essays labelled as chapters and put between covers. Developing from this into proper books with a narrative thread running from the beginning through the middle to the end was a notable achievement, I felt, but I was increasingly attracted to the idea of combining this achievement with writing something shorter to convey the maximum information as briefly (and intelligibly) as possible. The biggest challenge of this kind would be quantum physics so the idea for Six Impossible Things was born. It seemed to work, and as there was a demand for more, the obvious subject to tackle next (as being almost as difficult to understand as quantum physics) was life. As one reviewer commented, the next book should probably have been called Seven Pillars of Life, but my journalistic training led me (probably mistakenly, I now realise) to the mild alliteration of Seven Pillars of Science. I hope nobody found that too confusing.

The possibility of expanding the series seemed at that point highly improbable, but while re-reading the complete Sherlock Holmes stories during lockdown (actually, listening to the superb narration by Stephen Fry), I was reminded of one of my favourite quotations When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth which must also have been a favourite of Conan Doyle, since it appears in slightly different versions in several of the stories. What, I mused, were the most improbable things we have discovered about the Universe? To complete the trilogy along the lines I had begun, I had to select Eight Improbable Possibilities, taking me halfway to the answer proposed by Douglas Adams. Which seems like a good place to stop and take stock of the story so far.

John Gribbin
February 2022